Investing in Climate Change Mitigation

As much as I favor environmental sustainability, there is nothing in the meme here that I agree with.

Investors must treat the crisis as an economy-wide threat?  No. Investors have money, and they can use it however and wherever they think will do them the most good, whether that means monetary profit or the satisfaction of doing what’s good for the world, or some combination of the two.

The investment world hasn’t responded decisively?  Again, no. Think of all the money that’s going into decarbonizing our transportation and energy sectors.  That means alternative fuel (especially electric) cars and trucks, renewable energy, and nuclear.

It’s all fairly impressive, especially considering that the fossil fuels industries essentially own the U.S. law-making processes.  This group of gargantuan corporations are ~125 years old, enormously profitable, and receive 7+ trillion dollars (worldwide) of subsidies annually.  They use our atmosphere are their own private sewer, and no one even thinks about asking them to pay to clean up after themselves.

$7 trillion is a lot of money, regardless of your standard, which makes the article linked above from the International Monetary Fund worth your time.

Another issue here is improving our use of land, which basically translates into moving away from beef, so as to enable us to stop destroying the Amazon rainforest.  As anyone could have guessed, however, the financial pressures here are analogous to those in fossil fuels, where the industry is putting a full-court press against plant-based and lab-grown meat, and has declared an all-out PR war.

Taking into consideration the economic pressures being applied by the industry incumbents, clean tech is actually doing fairly well.  But will its progress be sufficient to avert catastrophe?

No one knows.

Maybe the answer depends on how people like you and me react and get involved.